Last week, I wrote an article about three of Mike Mann’s companies earning spots on the 2012 Inc. 500 list. Phone.com (#262), DomainMarket.com (#292) and SEO.com (#491) were all included on the list, which had not been published at the time of my article.

The 2012 Inc. 500 list is now available on the Inc. magazine website, and we are able to learn some additional information about Mann’s companies. As a domain investor though, I am most interested in reading about the growth of Mann’s Domain Market business, which is a domain name aftermarket sales venue.

According to the Inc. 500 page for Domain Market, the company earned $2.1 million in 2011, and it has a total of 9 employees. The company was founded in 2007, and in 2008, the company reported just over $150k in sales.

Domain Market will almost certainly show considerable growth this year as well. In early March, Mike Berkens reported that Mike Mann’s Domain Asset Holdings had already closed over half a million in sales in 2012. I assume that number would be attributed to Domain Market, and if so, it would put the company on track to smash 2011 revenue records. This is just an assumption though, and DAH may be a different company entirely from DM.

Whatever the case is, it is impressive to see Mann grow Domain Market into a domain sales machine. He did the same thing with Buy Domains, which he eventually sold for a lot of money. Looks like he’s well on his way to building another big business.

About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.

Also wonder if the $2.1 million in revenue is actual domain sales or commission from domain sales. I don’t think Domain Market actually owns the names (Domain Asset Holdings owns them – for example NorthernIreland.com: http://whois.domaintools.com/northernireland.com)

Perhaps DAH is a subsidiary of Domain Market, which would make that a moot point. Not sure of the inner workings of Mike’s companies, but he certainly has built another big business.

You can only keep growing by adding more renewal fees to the bottom line, you basically have to make a few grand slam type sales, if you have 300K domains, and 2.1M in revenue, and 9 employees, end of the year all your income is wiped out, and you are left with a net loss, this is high stakes gambling… how long before you bust out?

This method has been tested many times, renewal fees are continue to increase, domain prices seem to head lower on the BIN bargain bin front, hmmm

If he does $6m this year (since he had $500k by the end of Feb, that would cover it. Alternatively, a company could run at a loss but be acquired for a sizable sum by a company looking to add revenue to its bottom line.

Not really sure how DomainMarket can be compared to FB or Twitter? You have one off type sales, the same users do not come back to your site on a hourly, or daily basis… Nothing special about what DomainMarket does, they grab drops, and put them up for sale, same thing a guy who buys storage lockers does, or a flea market seller… I am guessing the quality, aged domains, are probably part of a personal portfolio, or different company, end users are smarter than ever, and have more options than ever… game has changed.

What kind of company would buy a fresh reg drop portfolio, that has a yearly liability equivalent to sales, let alone other overheads, not seeing the big picture, Yun Ye days are long gone…

DomainMarket is buying some of my drops, drops that get like 1 hit per month, $0 ppc income all year, no inquiries, sure they send spam emails out, acting like they are auctioning off the name, or their is an intense demand, all total BS.

We own the brokerage and the source of the names, we now have over 300K names, keep in mind those are last year sales numbers and we are on a list of fastest growing companies, so sales are going to keep skyrocketing exactly like BuyDomains did when I owned it, same basic inventory value, traffic, and model with a few modern twists.

Mike Mann is a Spiritual Capitalist at heart and I applaud him on his genius of waving the Gtld debacle good riddance. The White noise that is being created on this Gtld experiment will be a hallow forgotten echoe 5 years from now. The media companies will make a fortune on the backs of unsuspecting victims that it will leave in its wake.

Mike knows this and is more than willing to let Creative Destruction deal with it. SMART !

If domainers are so smart, where are the equivalents like Peter Thiel (and the Paypal mafia) who invested $500K in Facebook (and other lucrative startups) – only to cash out $2BN (or whatever) a few years later

That’s why, domainers are nobodies with no contacts in the real tech world (Silcon Valley) let alone the real business world

Full of pissy little pricks who all brag about being big fish in a little pond

I am still the largest noninstitutional shareholder of NameMedia but I think DomainMarket shares are worth more, and Im sorry aggro does not understand the economics of our unbelievable collection. Does he know details on the $10M worth of brand new names I just added on top of the 300K names, but only paid a few hundred K? over and over? I dont think so, just a random hater.

Ron says “Not sure why you don’t focus on building out SEO.com, and PHONE.com, instead of regsitering all our crappy drops all day long, you must really need the airmiles.”

We are building those, both made the INC 500 for gosh sakes, what more could we do?

DomainMarket has inventory worth at least hundreds of millions no matter how bad you are at appraising, download excel from our site and do your own math on it, also millions of visitors to our landing pages.

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